Two Rivers Press has been publishing in and about Reading since 1994.
Founded by the artist Peter Hay (1951-2003), the press continues to
delight readers, local and further afield, with its varied list of
individually designed, thought-provoking books.

The Effect of Coastal Processes

“Here is a collection that demands and repays re-reading. Moving and aesthetically rewarding, the poems are informed by a deeply compassionate intelligence and shaped by a thoughtful yet unobtrusive craft. The haunting presence in these poems is the history of human nature – timeless, yet driven and defined by time’s passage; universal, yet inescapably relevant to private individual conscience. In addition to the uncharted watersheds of our private histories, Adrian Blamires draws unostentatiously on a knowledge and love of Greek myth, history, and English literature to make poems of acute contemporary relevance, in a language at once lyrical and demotic. In this lucid and deeply humane first collection, with its incontrovertible ‘clarity of loss’. Blamires offers us poem after poem as individual acts of restitution.” ~ Elizabeth Garret

“Ingenious, an aspiring Muldoonian.” ~ Carol Rumens, The Guardian

“Light-years in the living-room… scale-drawings in which the everyday becomes unnerving.” ~ Maria Barnas

“A fine, meditative poet.” ~ Jane Draycott

Adrian Blamires’ debut collection, The Effect of Coastal Processes was a Waterstone’s ‘Best New Poetry’ selection and the title poem was read on Radio 4’s Poetry Please.

The Effect of Coastal Processes on the Beach at Amroth

We blew into our hands for warmth, With calipers and a hypothesis Measuring the size and roundedness Of pebbles, the effect of coastal processes. The set of results confounded us. Maybe there’d been a recent storm:

The size of pebbles did not diminish In the direction of longshore drift, Not according to our sample. There must’ve been a shift In the prevailing wind. It’s simple, He explained to his girlfriend, we’re in this

Together – she was eight days late – But as they sat at the high tide Mark, watching the swash and backwash, Waves of attrition, a multitude Of tiny cuffing knocks, the fact was That in the fading daylight

Hushed and rocked she’d reached a decision, Calm, before a sea of troubles. In my palm’s a small flat stone: The flints we skim return as pebbles. Of the beach at Amroth’s population Would anyone ever miss this one?